


the coming forth by day of {he wants a tomb}

by PikaCheeka



Category: DRAMAtical Murder (Visual Novel), DRAMAtical Murder - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Backstory, Gen, Names, real life glitching, reality distortion, sensory perception issues, sort of I suppose
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-27
Updated: 2016-03-27
Packaged: 2018-05-29 13:03:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6375880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PikaCheeka/pseuds/PikaCheeka
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The world is an unexpectedly vast place for the boy who spent his small life in a small room. Noiz backstory fic on his emergence into the world and how he comes upon his name.<br/>--<br/>He isn’t thinking about Midorijima anymore, though somewhere in his mind he knows that’s where he wants to go. He just wants to sleep. He wants a small, dark, silent enclosed space. He wants a tomb.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the coming forth by day of {he wants a tomb}

**Author's Note:**

> This may or may not be the prologue of a very long Noiz fic. I’d love to write it, but I don’t know how realistic that interest is and I haven’t decided how I’d go about it yet, so I am posting this as it is with the possibility that it will be a standalone. Either way, I'll keep writing about him.

He learns very quickly just how easy things are online. Things. _Thing_. As in, living.

He presses his face against the window, studying the frost riming the panes, the tiny pinprick hole in one of the layers of glass. There must be a reason for it; it’s too perfectly centered to be a defect, but of all the things he’d read about in his small life in his small room, airplane construction was not one of them. He wishes it had been.

Running away was not the issue. Running away was easier than he’d ever imagined it would be. It was something he’d always thought about, of course, dreamed of and dreamed up a hundred thousand ways to escape, but they were nothing but that – dreams – until suddenly the ninth anniversary of his incarceration passed and he realized he couldn’t let it reach ten years. He didn’t know why that was the rule. He’d already spent more than half his life in that room, and the 2,254th day had passed just like any other. That didn’t matter. The rule was that it could not reach ten. He had to leave, and he had to leave immediately. So his dreams ceased to be dreams, and became plans, and he decided in that moment that he would never dream again. If he couldn’t carry something out, it was pointless to consider it. Dreams were for fools. Dreams allowed him to sit in that room for nine years.

He’d followed the comings and goings of his parents for years. Not in person – no. He hadn’t seen either one of them since they closed the door on him so many years before. He couldn’t even remember their faces as they once were. Nor did he watch them from afar, as his room was in the back corner of the house. He never saw who was coming and going, regardless of the size of his window and the beauty of the view he had. Nearly two kilometers from the road, he never saw anyone from that back window, and nobody ever wondered why the second boy of the house never seemed to step outside that sad little room. No. He had followed his parents online.

At first he had wanted to know everything he could about them. They’d used the same internet connection as he did, before he had ordered and installed his own router, and he was easily able to access their search records. They were never very careful. Strange how easily adults trust those they live with, even if they treat them poorly. And not only their search records, but their favorite websites, their log-in names and passwords. He knew everything they looked at, examined everything they bought and wondered where such and such an item might end up in the house he was rapidly coming to forget. He didn’t know why he did it. He told himself it was revenge, told himself they deserved to have their lives peered into. But he also feared it was because he loved and missed them terribly, and this was the only way he could ever know them now. As the years passed though, he stopped caring. He stopped being curious about their lives. He stopped being angry at them. He stopped wondering if he loved them. He only typed their names into the basic search engine from time to time to see where two of Stuttgart’s top socialites were off to with their charming young son, what parties and ribbon-cutting ceremonies they were cordially invited to, what trips and cruises they happily and very publicly embarked on. With their charming young son. Never son _s_. He didn’t know if, or when, it ever stopped bothering him. He got pretty good at pushing that aspect of himself back into the corner where it belonged. So he told himself. All he knew for sure was there was a beautiful three-week window in the April before his sixteenth birthday where they would be gone, off to Belfast for some commemoration of something or another. It coincided perfectly with All Nippon Airways opening a direct flight from Munich to Osaka. He knew Munich was far away, several hours by taxi, but it was for the best. They were unlikely to assume he left the country from Munich, for one. No connecting flights, for another. Perfect.

He wasn’t worried that he was only fifteen. He knew he was smarter than most adults. He felt that though isolated, he was educated enough about the world from the internet. He’s fluent in a handful of languages and has a working knowledge of another handful. He’d learned about identity theft by the time he was eleven, had a dozen new names and addresses around the world, seven in Germany alone, by the time he was twelve. At first he’d bought them. Then he’d learned how to steal them himself. And from there, to sell them.

Money had never been an issue for him. Even before he’d discovered how lucrative fake names could be, he’d taken from his parents. Maybe to see if they would notice, if they would finally bang on his door and demand to speak to him. Maybe because he hated them. Maybe because it was just convenient. He stole exorbitantly, ordered anything and everything he wanted offline, all for the maids, the butler, the hired help, to drag those boxes upstairs and leave them in the tiny locked vestibule designed specially for his room and lock the door behind them before he opened his own side to retrieve the packages. And as he had so much time in that small room, the prospect of online schooling long since abandoned once he’d learned his parents didn’t care that he hadn’t passed the fifth grade, he began to teach himself other things. Hacking. Malwares. Coding. Economics. Trading. Dealing. Politics. He even dabbled in the mob, though fraud and robbery tended to be less messy without them. Most of all though, he was fascinated by the world of virtual games. Rhyme, in particular, though it was unavailable in Germany and no amount of proxy servers could amend that. Rhyme, in particular, which reined in the United States and, most of all, in Japan. By the time he was fourteen, he was well-known in the deepweb. He was cunning, ruthless, hideous, and not a soul knew he was a damaged freak of a child locked up on the fourth floor of a mansion. Online, no one questioned his robotic voice, the single, shockingly blurry and therefore horrifying photo of himself in a bloodied doctor’s coat and a rabbit mask that popped up from time to time when he infiltrated their computer.

He thinks of this rabbit mask now, burned to ashes in the bathroom tub with so much else he once owned. Because of that mask, and because of what he did online and who he spoke to, he’d never actually confronted anyone, never wondered about facial expressions or fluctuations in speech. While other teens his age played on social media, used Coils for facetime chats, stayed visible and connected to their peers every minute of the day even when alone in their room, he’d let nine years pass without a single attempt to speak to someone face to face.

And now there are too many faces. Too many eyes he can’t meet that show things he can’t understand. Too many mouths opening and closing around him, making noises he knows he should understand – they are in Germany, Germany! – but can’t. He pushes his face harder against the glass, flattening the nose he can’t feel, and desperately wishes that everyone else on the plane would vanish.

Things had gone to hell almost immediately after he picked the locks – a several hour affair that required significant practice, as he’d never been particularly adept with his fingers - and stepped from his room that morning. Seven hours before the maid would arrive. He’d left notes with increasingly regularity the last several months saying he just wanted several days work of food left in the vestibule at once, to be sure she wouldn’t notice he was gone for some time. Teenage behavior. If she was ever suspicious, she said nothing. Not that she would say anything, because nobody talked to him.

The hallway had been dark, cold, unfamiliar, and long. So long. He’d been so overwhelmed by the space that it took him several wrong turns to find the stairs, find the front door. He’d wanted to avoid walking through the house as much as possible, had left the lights off to be sure he saw little that might cause him to question his choices, but it still sent a thrill through his body that was wholly unfamiliar and wholly horrific.

Stepping outside had been nearly too much. He’d nearly turned back. The shock of the open sky above him, the lack of walls in any direction, the space, the _space_. He’d dropped his one bag and stumbled, disoriented by the unevenness of a ground that was anything but hardwood floor suddenly rendering one leg shorter than the other. In that moment, he’d been thankful for his numbness, thankful that he couldn’t feel the sun or the air on his skin, couldn’t smell whatever there might be to smell, couldn’t see in any significant clarity how the world no longer had edges, and couldn’t hear even the silence. Because as numb as he was, it was still too much. It had been several minutes before the taxi arrived. Sleek, anonymous, here to take him to Stuttgart’s airport so he could turn around and grab another to Munich. He’d be impossible to track from one to the next, he’d reasoned, what with how many people took taxis from airports on a daily basis.

And when the taxi came and he’d fallen into the backseat, hands shaking to open the door, buckle the seatbelt that he hadn’t seen in nearly a decade, it suddenly hit him that the taxi driver might want to talk, and that unfamiliar horror he’d felt in the dark hallway returned. He’d been lucky though, the driver having no patience for nor interest in rich teenagers, and had driven to the airport without another word. He kept his eyes closed for the ride, savoring the silence, the closeness of the car’s interior, the darkness behind his eyelids. He didn’t need to look out the window. He was leaving Germany forever.

The second taxi driver had been unpleasant, to say the least. As soon as the first had pulled out of the drop-off lot with a new passenger, he’d jumped into the next cab, stuffed a handful of Euros in the front seat, far more than necessary, and said he needed him for the day. He was going to the Munich airport. The words came out flatly, haltingly, and strangely accented, and the driver had told him to speak in German or get the fuck out. It hit him then how much better it would be if he pretended to be foreign, so he’d repeated the words, even worse than before, and dropped another 200 euro onto the seat. That had been it. Money talked for him. And as he’d sunk into the back seat and closed his eyes again, he’d let himself believe that everything would be fine as long as he had enough money to wave around. That was how things were online, anyway.

But things didn’t go as planned once he arrived at the airport. It had been a larger building than he’d ever believed imaginable. The lights were vibrant and florescent. The noises were terrifying, as muffled as they were, and coming from all around. Hundreds of thousands of people, smears of gray instead of faces, shuffling past him in every which way. At one point he’d been knocked over, only to have another person grab his arm and pull him roughly to his feet. That second individual, he’d stared at long enough to see their eyes inside the shadow of their face, and it had terrified him so much he’d jerked out of their grasp, lashed out. These were people. All these shadows, humans, people, and he suddenly wanted to die, wanted to run, wanted to retreat back into his room on the fourth floor and fall back into a life of darkness and silence and enclosed spaces and solitude, a world he could entirely control, as small as it was.

He’d somehow made it to a bathroom, fallen against a mirror, stared at himself, sweat-soaked blonde hair and pale green eyes in a face drained of life, wondered how he could possibly be the same as everything, everyone, else out there in that chaotic screaming space with no walls or edges or clarity as he fumbled in his suitcase, his sole piece of luggage, for pills. Anxiety medication, ordered over the black market last month. Ordered online, where life was easier. He’d tried them out often enough in the weeks leading up to his departure, but it wasn’t as if the situations were comparable. What was a good dosage for now? 10 mg? After less than thirty seconds he’d decided it wouldn’t be enough, and took another 10 mg. And then he’d crawled into the supplies closet and laid down among the extra toilet paper and mops for nearly an hour while his mind reeled at the prospect that there was a world around him now he was inexplicably a part of.

It was the last hour of peace he would ever have. The medicine had been too much. He can’t remember much of what happened between that hour in the closet and now, as he sits with his face pressed flat against the window pane. He’s relieved he can’t remember. He’d gone to the bathroom as soon as he’d boarded, had been violently ill for several minutes before promptly swallowing more pills, and there he’d found bloodied knuckles and a dislocated finger and bruises already forming on his arms. He’d popped the finger back in, wiped the blood off his hands, and threw up once more for good measure. When he’d stumbled into his seat again, Business class because he felt First class was too suspicious but Economy too unpleasant, the woman beside him had promptly begun chatting.

It’d taken him a long time to figure that out, to understand that she was talking to him even though they weren’t face to face, that that was something people did. He couldn’t make out what she was saying, though he could recognize she was speaking German, and he’d finally in desperation sputtered something in Russian that he remembered from a recent information exchange. He didn’t know Russian, and had no clue what he said, but he hoped she didn’t either, and would just assume he was trying to say he couldn’t understand her. Then he’d shoved the airplane-issue headphones low over his ears and turned to the window, fighting back the nausea and horror that people, other people, brought out in him.

And the hours pass. He spends an alarming amount of time trying to remember how many pills he took and how many he has left, if it’s enough to kill himself with if he has to, because this was all a terrible idea. He wonders how hard it would be to break the glass of the window panes, but of all the things he’d read about in his small life in his small room, airplane construction was not one of them. He wishes it had been.

By the time he disembarks in Osaka, he doesn’t remember the bloodied knuckles or the dislocated finger or the bruises on his arms. He’s tired and hungry and desperate to crawl into the nearest capsule hotel and sleep for several days before figuring out what to do for the rest of his life. He isn’t thinking about Midorijima anymore, though somewhere in his mind he knows that’s where he wants to go. He just wants to sleep. He wants a small, dark, silent enclosed space. He wants a tomb.

When he’s passing through customs, he lies about how much cash he’s carrying and thinks nothing of it. When he shows them his fake passport and fake work visa, he sees the red flag come up on the computer screen, and thinks of nothing but sleep.

“Sir?” the woman at the counter is speaking in English for some reason. “Please step over there.”

“Fuck you,” he replies promptly, still thinking about sleep.

The security guard grabs him before he even realizes what he said, and in a knee-jerk reaction he wrenches his arm free, whirls, lands a sharp flat-handed jab at the taller man’s throat, spits at him, lunges at the counter and snatches up his passport and visa, and runs, lone suitcase, all of six kilograms, crashing against his side. He doesn’t think of sleep anymore, doesn’t think of anything, and simply bolts in a blind panic.

The florescent lights scream around him as he shoves through the crowd, kicking and swatting his way past blurry faces as he dodges arms and hurls himself over a counter, through a door, down an escalator. He hasn’t run more than a few paces in nine years but he finds the energy and doesn’t question it. Maybe it’s all those years punching and kicking and stabbing dummies he’d ordered online that kept his muscles functioning. Maybe it’s simple blind fear. He doesn’t know and doesn’t care. And as he runs, one foot in front of the other in new shoes, his memory returns in flashes. He remembers being found in the airport bathroom by the janitor. He remembers attacking him. He remembers guards grabbing him, speaking in low voices about unaccompanied minors and terrorists and rich brats and remembers wondering if they will ever realize which one he is, if he himself knows which he is, because identity out here is not the same as identity in his small room, and he doesn’t know where he belongs here. He remembers questions about his medication, ultimately dismissed because his paperwork looked good enough. He remembers the faces of the guards when they see his passport, his age, his name, the make of his suitcase, the cut of his newly purchased suit, but he can’t understand the emotion on their faces. He remembers being escorted to the plane. He remembers being sworn at, insulted, for wasting security’s time when there are _real_ terrorists out there and they’re going to let Japan deal with him because they’re done with his rich ass. He remembers all of this as he runs, and wonders if he should perhaps not try to break the nose of the next person who approaches him, wonders if he should perhaps practice lying low until he knows what the hell is going on.

Though it is the second one he has been in today, he can’t comprehend how large the airport is, and it isn’t long before his exhaustion catches up to him, before the lights and the space and the sounds and the crush of faceless blurs of people around him consume what little energy he has left. He stumbles to a halt and surveys the area, squinting at the signs. He can’t read kanji, though a nearby booth is clearly selling maps. Information brokers then. That’s something familiar, at least. He wants to smile but can’t remember how, and puts one foot in front of the other. His feet don’t work very well, but he somehow makes it, somehow trips and falls against the counter, and in a flash the woman is around to his side, pushing him towards the back, sitting him in a chair. She says something he can’t make out, and he wonders why everyone here is so eager to speak English to him when he is clearly German. He remembers how to smile then, and does so.

It isn’t the right thing to do, he realizes as she looks startled and backs away from him. Perhaps punching her would have been better, he thinks dully as he slides lower into the chair. He wonders who she is speaking to but he can’t see well enough. Just another blur. The lights are too bright and the ceiling is too high. He never wants to be in the sky again, he thinks absently. He just wants to sleep. He wants a small, dark, silent enclosed space.

And then there is another face in front of him. Uncomfortably close. “What’s your name, kid?” Japanese now, but the words are simple enough that he can understand.

He averts his eyes, willing the man to go away. He hadn’t considered how at a smooth-faced 157 centimeters he wasn’t a good match for the twenty years of age his passport says. No matter, he doesn’t even remember the name he’s supposed to have, and he can’t check his passport before answering – too suspicious, and he’s already too suspicious. He opens his mouth, closes it. His tongue feels swollen and his breath tastes stale. The interrogator’s eyes are uncomfortably clear, but that is all he can comprehend of the fog around his face. He sees the man’s arm move towards him, knows his hand is on his shoulder though he can’t feel it. He can’t feel anything he can’t feel anything he can’t feel anything. The faces are too close. The eyes are too far apart. The lights are too bright. The space is too wide. The air is trapping all the sights and sounds he can’t separate or comprehend and is suffocating him with all of them. He can taste everything on his tongue as he breathes faster and faster. He can _feel_ everything on his tongue as his throat closes up and the air catches in his mouth. He can feel the light and the air and the sights and the sounds and everything is condensing inside of his mouth, underneath his tongue, all the world he is now a part of becoming one screaming painful… “Hey, Kid? Name?”

He utters a single word in English before the tomb closes around him. “ _Noise_.”

 

 

 

 


End file.
